A Click Away: Locals Abroad

For the keynote exhibition in this year’s Brighton Photo Biennial, Martin Parr, of Magnum, commissioned three photographers to shoot the British seaside city of Brighton and Hove.

When Alec Soth, an American, arrived in the U.K., he was officially prohibited from taking photographs, as he did not have a license to work here. So he enlisted his young daughter, Carmen, in the photographic pursuit of an elusive Easter bunny on the streets of Brighton; they walked together, but Carmen took the shots. Pink figures prominently, as do bunnies, flowers, and the sidewalk—a subject that adults tend to overlook.

For his commission, Stephen Gill, a native of Bristol, snapped pictures while collecting bits and bobs from the streets and beaches. He then superimposed the things he found—washed-up shrimp, shells, pieces of plastic—over the film. (He took a similar approach for “Hackney Flowers,” his study of a changing London borough.)

Rinko Kawauchi, of Japan, experimented with digital photography, studying the flight patterns of the massive flocks of starlings that swoop over the sea in the winter. The effect is both fleeting and monumental.